Pendo Pricing in 2026: What It Actually Costs
Shayan, FounderUpdated 20 min read
Pendo does not list a single dollar figure on its pricing page. Outside of Pendo Free, which caps your workspace at 500 Monthly Active Users and leaves out the feedback module and session replay, every paid plan requires a discovery call with sales and an annual contract. Across public procurement data and customer negotiation reports, entry Base contracts start around $7,000 to $15,000 a year, or roughly $583 a month at the floor, Core plans run $15,000 to $35,000 a year, and multi-module enterprise deals average around $47,000 a year and climb past $100,000.
The reason Pendo quotes vary so widely for teams of the same headcount is that you aren't paying for internal admin seats. Pendo bills on two axes at once: how many Monthly Active Users touch your product across a rolling 30-day window, and which product modules you bolt onto your base analytics contract. A ten-person startup with 25,000 active users in a freemium web app will get a much larger Pendo quote than a 200-person enterprise vendor with 1,500 high-value users.
Even after you pay for the base MAU tier, many of the capabilities buyers associate with Pendo are gated behind top packages or priced as separate add-ons. If you want Pendo Listen to collect customer feature requests, Session Replay to watch user sessions, multi-question Sentiment surveys, Orchestrate email journeys, or even SAML single sign-on and public API access, each one either pushes you into a higher bundle or adds another line item to your order form.
Below is how Pendo's 2026 package lineup, the rolling 30-day MAU meter, the Pendo Listen feedback add-on, and the contract fine print actually work before you get on a sales call.
Pendo pricing plans
On Pendo's live US pricing page in 2026, paid subscriptions are organized into three quote-only tiers, Base, Core, and Ultimate, alongside Pendo Free for up to 500 MAUs and an open beta card for Novus, Pendo's separate codebase-monitoring tool. Until January 2026, Pendo also sold a fourth mid-market tier called Pulse positioned between Core and Ultimate; while Pulse was removed from the public comparison grid in early 2026, its capability bracket still shows up in procurement benchmarks and renewal quotes.
Because Pendo does not publish a rate card, the table below combines Pendo's official 2026 plan entitlements with the annual contract ranges reported in public buyer benchmarks and customer negotiations.
| Plan | Estimated annual cost | Typical MAU bracket | Included modules and key limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 500 MAUs | Retroactive analytics, branded guides and NPS, basic roadmaps, 12-month event access; no Pendo Listen |
| Base | $7,000 to $15,000 | 2,000 to 5,000 MAUs | Core product analytics and unbranded in-app guides; Replay, Listen, Sentiment, and Orchestrate add-ons |
| Core | $15,000 to $35,000 | 5,000 to 20,000 MAUs | Everything in Base plus Session Replay included; Listen, Sentiment, and Orchestrate remain add-ons |
| Pulse, legacy tier | $35,000 to $70,000 | 20,000 to 50,000 MAUs | Retired from the live pricing grid in January 2026; bundled product discovery and NPS surveys |
| Ultimate / Enterprise | $70,000 to $130,000+ | 50,000+ MAUs | Analytics, Guides, Session Replay, Pendo Listen discovery, Sentiment, Orchestrate, and Data Sync |
Pendo Free: $0 up to 500 MAUs
Pendo Free is a permanent $0 tier rather than a timed trial, capped at 500 Monthly Active Users with unlimited internal teammates and 12 months of event-data history. It gives a very small product retroactive page and feature analytics, basic in-app guides, single-question NPS surveys, roadmaps, external MCP access, and up to 500 monthly prompts in Agent Analytics.
The catch is what Free leaves out and what happens when your 501st user logs in. Free carries Pendo branding on your guides and NPS surveys, provides only community and bot support with no human support tickets, and excludes Pendo Listen, Session Replay, the in-app Resource Center, third-party integrations, custom CNAME domains, and Pendo's Leo AI assistant. Once your app crosses 500 MAUs, Pendo blocks you from creating new guides, NPS surveys, or segments, and your analytics reports drop to a random sample of 500 visitors.
If you try to sign up for Pendo Free in late 2026, you will also run into conflicting pages on Pendo's own site. While the pricing FAQ and registration page still let anyone with a business email address create a free account, Pendo's dedicated Free landing page states that existing Free subscriptions are preserved while directing new signups to Novus, a separate engineering tool in free open beta that does not include Pendo's guides, roadmaps, or feedback portals. If you want to test the full paid platform first, Pendo offers a 30-day trial if activated before you install the SDK, or a 14-day trial if you start on Free and activate it after installation.
Base: estimated $7,000 to $15,000 a year
Base is Pendo's entry paid contract, typically scoped for teams with 2,000 to 5,000 MAUs. Stepping up from Free to Base removes the 500-MAU wall, unlocks unbranded in-app guides and the in-app Resource Center, and gives your team access to human technical support between 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM Eastern time on weekdays.
What catches buyers off guard on Base is how stripped-down the package is for a contract starting near $583 a month. Base covers product analytics and in-app guides, and historically included only a single integration. Session Replay, Pendo Listen for customer feedback, multi-question Sentiment surveys, and Orchestrate journey emails are all excluded from the base tier and sold as paid add-ons.
Core: estimated $15,000 to $35,000 a year
Core is where most mid-sized SaaS companies land when they want both product analytics and visual debugging, typically covering 5,000 to 20,000 MAUs at roughly $1,250 to $2,900 a month on an annual invoice.
The main difference between Base and Core on Pendo's 2026 plan grid is that Core bundles Session Replay into the subscription so your team can watch web and mobile user sessions alongside funnel and retention charts. Even at this price point, Pendo Listen for feedback collection, Sentiment surveys, and Orchestrate remain paid add-ons on top of your Core quote.
Pulse and Ultimate: estimated $35,000 to $130,000+ a year
Until January 2026, Pendo listed Pulse as its third paid plan, typically quoted between $35,000 and $70,000 a year for 20,000 to 50,000 MAUs because it was the first bundle to include Pendo Listen and NPS sentiment tools by default. Between December 8, 2025 and January 18, 2026, Pendo dropped the Pulse column from its pricing page and consolidated those capabilities into Ultimate.
Today, Ultimate is the only standard package on Pendo's pricing grid that includes Analytics, In-App Guides, Session Replay, Pendo Listen product discovery, Sentiment surveys, Orchestrate journey automation, and Data Sync warehouse exports in one bundle. Across third-party procurement reports, mid-to-large Pendo contracts average around $47,000 a year, or roughly $3,916 a month, while Ultimate deployments for 50,000 to 100,000+ MAUs regularly run from $70,000 to over $130,000 a year.
How Pendo's MAU billing actually works
Most B2B software charges by internal seats or by active voters. Pendo charges for every end user who logs into your product over a rolling 30-day window, whether they ever click a guide, answer a survey, or submit a piece of feedback.
One detail in Pendo's MAU help documentation catches multi-app teams by surprise: Pendo calculates active visitors separately for each application in your subscription. If a single customer logs into your web dashboard in the morning and opens your iOS or Android mobile app in the afternoon, Pendo counts that person as two MAUs toward your contract allowance. The same doubling happens if your company runs two web products under one login.
Like most enterprise volume ladders, your cost per individual MAU goes down when you commit to 50,000 users instead of 5,000, but your total annual invoice steps up sharply at each bracket. Launching a self-serve tier or a viral feature that doubles your active signups without doubling your revenue will push your next Pendo renewal into a higher bracket.
If your paid account goes over its contracted MAU allowance mid-year, Pendo's pricing FAQ states that your service continues without interruption while your sales rep reaches out to adjust your contract. However, Pendo's MAU help article notes that over-limit reporting on paid plans can be sampled, and Section 8 of Pendo's February 2026 Platform Terms explicitly permits Pendo to charge additional unit fees starting from the first date you crossed your contracted limit, prorated through the remainder of your term.
Pendo Listen, AI, and modular add-on costs
If you are evaluating Pendo as a place to collect feature requests, run a public roadmap, or connect your existing tools, the base MAU quote is only the starting line. Almost every specialized capability sits on its own module gate or usage meter.
Pendo Listen and the August 2026 Feedback retirement: +20% to 30% on Base and Core
Pendo originally entered the feedback market by acquiring Receptive in May 2019, and later acquired AI feedback-analysis startup Zelta in July 2024. On August 1, 2026, Pendo permanently retired its classic Pendo Feedback product and replaced it with Pendo Listen, setting November 1, 2026 as the final cutoff date to export classic Feedback data before permanent deletion.
In Pendo's 2026 packaging, Listen is part of the Product Discovery module. It comes bundled only in Ultimate, and is sold as a paid add-on on Base and Core, where buyer negotiation reports typically place it at 20% to 30% on top of your base annual contract. If you want AI-assisted feedback imports from Zendesk tickets, Salesforce, Slack, or Gong, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams call transcripts, you also need Listen Explore enabled inside the module.
Listen also changes how customer requests work compared to a traditional public feedback board. Incoming requests do not go straight onto an open board where other users can browse and vote. Instead, submissions land internally as feedback evidence, and your product team curates which ideas to promote to an ideas portal hosted on portal.pendo.io. Comments on portal ideas can be restricted to the visitor who wrote them or their account rather than open cross-customer threads, and status update emails sent from Listen are capped at 5 times your contracted MAU count.
Session Replay, Guides Pro, and Sentiment
While Core and Ultimate include Session Replay, adding it to a Base contract requires a separate module fee. By default, Session Replay retains recorded web and mobile sessions for 30 days, with 90-day retention requiring an extended entitlement and saved clips lasting one year.
On the guidance side, basic tooltips and walkthroughs come with Base and Core, but conversational AI guide drafting with the Guides AI agent and custom guide-code integrations require upgrading to Guides Pro. Similarly, while single-question NPS is available on lower tiers, multi-question surveys and AI survey theme summaries require the Sentiment module, and automated journeys across in-app messages and email require Orchestrate.
AI meters: Leo, Agent Analytics, and Pendo Predict
Pendo splits its AI capabilities across several distinct products rather than including everything in one price. Leo, Pendo's internal intelligence agent that answers natural-language questions about product usage, flags adoption drops, and drafts guides and user segments, is excluded from Pendo Free and requires an enabled paid subscription. Meanwhile, Agent Toolkit, launched in open beta in September 2026 as part of Pendo for Agents, passes Pendo session context and frustration signals to external support bots like Intercom Fin via MCP and webhooks rather than giving Pendo its own customer-facing support chatbot.
Two other AI products run on their own separate volume meters. Agent Analytics, which measures how end users interact with your own AI agents across prompts, topics, and failure points, includes a free allowance of 500 prompts per calendar month. Once your workspace hits 500 prompts, data collection stops until 00:00 UTC on the first of the next month unless you sign a paid prompt-volume contract. Pendo Predict, built from Pendo's July 2025 acquisition of Forwrd.ai to score accounts for churn risk and expansion likelihood, is sold as a standalone add-on priced by custom monthly prediction volume.
SAML SSO, Salesforce, Data Sync, and API add-ons
In February 2026, Pendo updated its integration packaging so that standard connectors like Slack and Jira come bundled with their corresponding platform modules. Even so, Jira status synchronization is one-way, flowing from Jira into Pendo Listen only.
Several capabilities that software teams expect in a base subscription can still require separate contractual add-ons in Pendo: SAML 2.0 single sign-on for your team, the Salesforce connector, Data Sync for exporting raw analytics events to Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Amazon S3, public API access, webhooks, custom roles and permissions, and priority technical support with a named engineer. Note that even if you pay for Data Sync, it only exports usage events and visitor metadata, not your Pendo Listen feedback data.
What Pendo costs in practice and what buyers report
To see how quickly Pendo's modular pricing adds up, compare three common SaaS company stages against the typical annual contract ranges reported by buyers:
| Company stage | Pendo configuration | Estimated annual cost | Effective monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed startup with 400 MAUs, analytics and basic guides only | Pendo Free | $0 | $0, no Pendo Listen |
| Series A SaaS with 4,000 MAUs, analytics, guides, and Listen | Base plan + Product Discovery add-on | $9,000 to $19,500 | $750 to $1,625 a month |
| Growth SaaS with 15,000 MAUs, analytics, Replay, and Listen | Core plan + Product Discovery add-on | $19,500 to $45,000 | $1,625 to $3,750 a month |
| Mid-market or enterprise with 50,000+ MAUs and full suite | Ultimate bundle | $70,000 to $130,000+ | $5,833 to $10,833+ |
As an enterprise analytics and in-app guidance platform, Pendo has a large, established footprint: founded in 2013 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the company has raised $356 million in primary funding, passed $200 million in annual recurring revenue in early 2024, and holds a 4.4 out of 5 seller rating across 1,830 G2 reviews alongside an 8.5 out of 10 across 257 TrustRadius reviews. Reviewers consistently praise Pendo's retroactive event tracking, user segmentation, and how product managers can launch in-app walkthroughs without waiting on engineering sprints.
Where user frustration surfaces in reviews and community threads is almost always the quote-only wall, the cost of adding modules like Listen, and the jump at renewal. A December 2025 Capterra reviewer noted that Pendo's "pricing policy is a bit unclear," and in a June 2025 r/ProductManagement thread asking whether anyone had adopted Pendo Listen, one product team member reported that their company dropped Pendo over the expense and replaced it internally. In a July 2026 Hacker News discussion, a developer wrote that Pendo was a recent budget casualty at their company after they built internal replacements to "pay drastically less."
Stop guessing what to build. Let your users vote.
UserJot keeps feedback, roadmap, and changelog in one simple loop.
Negotiation tips and contract fine print
Because every paid Pendo subscription goes through a sales rep and a custom Order Form, the price on your first quote is rarely the floor. Procurement data from 1-to-3-year negotiations regularly shows 41% to 46% discounts off initial list quotes when buyers negotiate near the end of a quarter, commit to a multi-year term, or strip out unbundled modules like Sentiment, Orchestrate, or Listen that their team won't use in year one. Keep in mind that Pendo's Pendo for Startups page currently advertises standard Pendo Free entry rather than a published percentage discount on paid tiers.
Before you sign a Pendo Order Form, read four clauses in Pendo's February 23, 2026 Platform Terms of Service carefully:
- Subscriptions are non-cancellable and non-refundable. Paid plans bill annually in advance, and Section 8 of the Platform Terms makes payment obligations non-cancellable with no prorated refunds if you stop using the software mid-year.
- Termination notices cannot be sent by email. Under Section 16 of Pendo's Platform Terms, emailing your account rep or support does not count as legal termination or non-renewal notice. Formal termination notices must be delivered by hand, overnight courier, or eligible US certified mail to Pendo's legal department at 301 Hillsborough Street, Suite 1900, Raleigh, NC 27603.
- Annual renewal uplifts and MAU true-ups. Buyers regularly report automatic 5% to 20% annual price increases at renewal unless a renewal cap is written directly into the initial Order Form. And as noted earlier, exceeding your contracted MAU cap mid-term lets Pendo bill prorated unit overages from the first day of excess through the end of your contract term.
- 30-day window to retrieve your data after termination. While Pendo's older 2022 agreement gave departing customers 90 days to request their data, the current February 2026 Platform Terms shorten that retrieval window to 30 days after expiration or termination, followed by deletion. If your team still has legacy data in retired classic Pendo Feedback, you have until November 1, 2026 to download your separate CSV files for requests, votes, accounts, and comments before they are permanently deleted.
Is Pendo worth it?
Pendo is worth the five-figure annual commitment when product analytics and in-app onboarding are the core problems you are hiring it to solve. If you run a multi-product organization with 20,000 to 100,000+ monthly active users, have a dedicated product operations team, and want retroactive click tracking, session replay, segmented in-app walkthroughs, and Salesforce-linked discovery under one vendor with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, US/EU/Japan/Australia regional hosting, and HIPAA BAA options, Pendo is built for that scale.
For a software or SaaS team whose real priority is collecting customer feature requests, sharing a public roadmap, publishing a changelog, and talking to users, buying Pendo is a very expensive detour.
First, you have to sign a quote-only analytics contract metered by every logged-in visitor just to unlock Pendo Listen as an extra 20% to 30% add-on. Second, Pendo Listen is built around curated internal evidence rather than an open community board: your ideas portal lives on portal.pendo.io, where robots.txt blocks search engines from indexing your board, and customers only see the ideas your staff manually promote. Third, Pendo has no hosted public changelog page and no live chat or support email inbox. When a customer votes on an idea or runs into a bug, Pendo still expects you to pay for a separate help desk like Intercom or Zendesk to actually talk to them.
Pendo alternatives
UserJot
We built UserJot for software and SaaS teams that want the entire customer feedback and support loop in one modern product, with a published flat price instead of a quote-only MAU meter. See our full Pendo alternative comparison for a feature-by-feature breakdown.
With UserJot, you get a public or private feedback board with automatic duplicate detection as users type, a public roadmap where customers can vote and comment on Planned and In Progress work, a hosted changelog at its own URL, and an in-app widget that brings all three inside your product. When you add Conversations, currently in beta and free on every plan while in beta, live chat from the widget and forwarded support emails land in a shared team inbox. Juno, our AI agent, answers routine customer questions from your help docs and crawled websites, hands conversations to your team when a person is needed, and searches your public feedback board right inside the chat thread to file a new request or add the customer's vote once they confirm. When you ship a feature and mark the request Completed, UserJot automatically emails everyone who posted, voted, or commented, and Juno can draft your changelog post in the editor from the requests you completed.
Instead of metering your bill by Monthly Active Users or charging extra for a feedback module, UserJot costs $0, $29, or $59 a month flat for your entire workspace, whether you have 500 active users or 500,000.
| Active users in your app | Pendo Base or Core + Listen add-on | UserJot |
|---|---|---|
| 500 MAUs | Custom quote, Listen not on Free | $0 |
| 5,000 MAUs | ~$750 to $1,625 a month | $29 |
| 20,000 MAUs | ~$1,625 to $3,750 a month | $29 |
| 50,000+ MAUs | ~$5,833+ a month on Ultimate | $59 |
The permanent Free plan covers up to three teammates and includes unlimited end users, unlimited posts, two feedback boards, a public roadmap, a changelog, the in-app widget, live chat, support email, and Juno. Starter at $29 a month covers up to 100 teammates and adds five boards, a custom domain like feedback.yourcompany.com, private boards, post moderation, automatic login from the widget to the board, and one integration. Our REST API and MCP server are on every plan, including Free, so an agent or integration works from day one without paying. Pro at $59 a month adds 100 boards, all integrations including Slack, Discord, and email-to-feedback, JWT single sign-on on the board, public identity masking, and removing the UserJot badge. You can pay monthly or yearly, cancel any time from your dashboard settings, and export your posts as a CSV whenever you want.
We also keep a clear boundary around what UserJot is and is not: UserJot is not a product analytics, retroactive event-tracking, session replay, or tooltip product-tour platform, and we do not build native Jira or Salesforce connectors. If you need funnel analytics and session recordings, pair a transparent analytics tool with UserJot rather than paying $47,000 a year for a bundled enterprise contract.
Other tools to compare
Depending on whether you came to Pendo for feedback boards, product analytics, or in-app onboarding guides, several focused tools publish their pricing openly:
Canny covers feedback boards, roadmaps, and changelogs with native Jira, Linear, Intercom, and Zendesk integrations, and prices by tracked users rather than total app MAUs. Its Free plan caps you at 25 tracked users, Core starts at $24 a month for 100 tracked users and climbs to $311 a month at 1,000 tracked users, and Pro starts at $99 a month and reaches $661 a month at 1,000 tracked users. See Canny pricing and our Canny alternative guide.
Productboard focuses on internal product prioritization, customer insight linking, and multi-team roadmaps without Pendo's analytics SDK, charging per internal maker seat rather than per end user. Unlike UserJot or Canny, Productboard's customer portal keeps submitted requests private to the person who submitted them rather than running an open public voting board. See Productboard pricing and our Productboard alternative guide.
Beamer is built for teams that mainly wanted Pendo's in-app announcement feed and release notes widget, billing by monthly visitors who load the widget. Beamer offers a free plan up to 1,000 monthly visitors, then charges $49 a month on annual billing for Starter with 10,000 visitors, $99 a month for Pro with 30,000 visitors and NPS surveys, and $249 a month for Scale with 100,000 visitors, with its feedback module billed separately. See Beamer pricing and our Beamer alternative guide.
PostHog, Mixpanel, and Amplitude are the most common destinations for teams that actually need Pendo's product analytics, funnels, and session replay without a quote-only annual contract. All three offer free monthly event and replay allowances with published usage-based pricing, and many SaaS teams run one of them for analytics alongside UserJot at $29 a month for feedback, roadmaps, changelogs, and customer chat.
Userflow, Appcues, and Chameleon focus specifically on no-code onboarding checklists, tooltips, and step-by-step product tours, with published entry plans starting between $240 and $279 a month rather than requiring a five-figure analytics bundle.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Pendo cost per month?
Pendo does not offer month-to-month billing and requires an annual or multi-year contract on every paid plan. Based on public procurement data and buyer reports, the effective monthly cost starts around $583 a month on the entry Base plan at $7,000 a year, rises to $1,250 to $2,900 a month on Core, and averages around $3,916 a month at $47,000 a year for multi-module enterprise contracts.
Does Pendo have a free plan in 2026?
Yes, Pendo Free costs $0 for up to 500 Monthly Active Users and includes retroactive analytics, Pendo-branded in-app guides, branded NPS surveys, basic roadmaps, and 12 months of event data. It excludes Pendo Listen for feedback, Session Replay, the Resource Center, third-party integrations, and human support tickets. Note that Pendo's dedicated Free page in late 2026 directs new signups toward Novus, a separate product in open beta, while Pendo's registration page still allows free signups with a business email address.
What counts as a Monthly Active User in Pendo?
A Monthly Active User is a unique visitor who is active in your product within a rolling 30-day window. Pendo counts visitors separately in each application you track, so a single customer who logs into both your web app and your mobile app in the same month counts as two MAUs toward your contract limit.
Does Pendo include feedback features on its base plan?
No. Pendo's feedback and idea validation module, Pendo Listen, is excluded from Pendo Free and is not included in the base price of the Base or Core plans. It is bundled only into the top Ultimate tier or sold as a paid Discovery add-on on Base and Core, where buyers typically report paying an extra 20% to 30% on top of their base contract.
What happened to classic Pendo Feedback and the Pulse plan?
Pendo retired its classic Feedback product on August 1, 2026 and replaced it with Pendo Listen, setting November 1, 2026 as the final deadline to export classic Feedback CSVs before permanent deletion. Separately, between December 2025 and January 2026, Pendo removed the mid-tier Pulse plan from its public pricing grid, folding its discovery and NPS capabilities into the Ultimate bundle or selling them as modular add-ons.
Does Pendo have a public changelog?
Pendo offers an Announcements module inside its in-app Resource Center for showing release notes to logged-in users, but it does not document a standalone hosted public changelog page with its own URL that visitors or prospects can browse outside your app. If you want a public changelog page alongside an in-app widget and a feedback board, UserJot includes all three on every plan starting at $0.
Can you negotiate Pendo pricing?
Yes. Because Pendo sells exclusively through custom quotes, vendor negotiation benchmarks show discounts of 41% to 46% on 1-to-3-year deals, especially when signing near the end of a quarter or removing unused modules like Sentiment and Orchestrate from the bundle. Always ask for a cap on annual renewal price increases in your initial Order Form so your rate does not jump 5% to 20% in year two.
How do I cancel Pendo, and what happens to my data?
Under Pendo's February 2026 Platform Terms of Service, annual payments are non-cancellable and non-refundable, and formal termination notices cannot be sent by email. You must deliver written notice by hand, courier, or eligible US certified mail to Pendo's legal department in Raleigh, North Carolina, and you have 30 days after your contract ends to request your data before it is deleted.
